A Pastor Knew a Sex Offender Was Working Near His Church’s Children. He Said Nothing for Years.

Don Williams spent 27 years building Pawleys Island Community Church into a South Carolina institution with its own school — Pawleys Island Christian Academy. This week he was arrested, alongside his wife Ginny, and charged with obstruction of justice, unlawfully placing a child at risk, and criminal conspiracy.

The reason: Warren Perry, a man convicted in 2023 of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor, was working as a custodian at the academy — near children, on church property — while on probation. At a community meeting afterward, Williams didn’t deny knowing. He said he and other church leaders knew about the conviction and simply believed Perry was complying with his probation terms.

Here is the part worth getting right. This is not a story about one bad hire. It is a story about a pastor who had the information — a completed conviction, a named offense, a probation status — and made an institutional decision to let the risk stand rather than remove it. 'We believed he was complying with probation' is not the same sentence as 'we didn’t know.' Those are two very different defenses, and Williams chose the one that admits knowledge while minimizing responsibility.

Continuity Over the People in Its Care

The pattern is this: an institution had the information needed to remove a known risk and chose institutional continuity over the safety of the people in its care — then framed the outcome as a probation-compliance failure rather than its own decision.

Twenty-seven years of trust got spent on a bet that a convicted sex offender’s probation paperwork was more reliable than removing him from proximity to children. When the bet failed, the church didn’t get to call it a surprise — because it wasn’t one. It was a known risk, managed quietly, until it couldn’t be managed anymore.

The language is the tell. 'We believed he was complying' turns a deliberate choice into a passive expectation. It shifts the burden of safety off the institution and onto a probation officer’s caseload. It lets the church stand as a bystander to a situation it actively created. That framing — responsibility relocated from a decision-maker to a process — is how institutions protect their own continuity while telling themselves they did nothing wrong. Continuity becomes the highest value, and the people in its care become the cost of preserving it.

These questions aren’t about Pawleys Island alone. They’re about learning to hear the moment an institution turns a deliberate choice into a passive one — and what that translation is costing someone you may never meet.

1. Where have you seen 'we believed they were complying' used to soften a decision that was actually a choice to look away?
2. What’s the cost of loyalty to an institution when that loyalty is being paid for by someone else’s safety?

Community voices gathering.

Community voices will be gathered from the Community Hub thread once it’s posted. The early pattern: people feel the gap between 'we believed he was complying' and the actual children who were placed at risk — and they want language that names the choice the church made, not just the outcome it produced.

Naming the Silence That Felt Safer Than Action

This practice is about learning to feel, in your own body, the difference between an institution that didn’t know and one that knew and chose continuity — so you can name it out loud when you see it.

When a church, school, or organization says 'we didn’t know,' ask specifically what they knew, when, and what the alternative to their chosen response would have cost them. The cost of the alternative is usually the answer.

Four pathways forward. Which one calls to you?